Please submit only technical tips that will help other TidBITS readers better use their Macs, iPhones, iPads, and related software and hardware. All product announcements should be sent to releases@tidbits.com.

Tip title*

Your tip*

URL

Enter the URL to a Web page that supports your tip.

Linked text

Enter the name of the page linked above.

Your name*

Your email*

* indicates required fields

To help us avoid automated posts and spam, please enter the words below.

When you submit a tip, you give us permission to use it. Read our terms for more details. All submissions are reviewed before publication.

Our terms: By submitting a tip, you agree to assign TidBITS Publishing Inc., a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual license to reproduce, publish, and distribute your tip in connection with the TidBITS Web site and associated products in any media. You agree that you created the content you submitted, and that you have the right to assign us this license. You give us permission to use your name, but your email address won't be publicly displayed or shared. We review all submissions before publication, and reserve the right to select which submissions we feel are appropriate for our readers and to edit those we publish.

Our terms: We reserve the right to edit or delete any comment, so please post thoughtfully. We use your email address only to send you a one-time verification message confirming that you posted this comment. We also store your address to allow you to verify using other Web browsers in the future. For more info, see our privacy policy.

Fixing Save as Adobe PDF Crashes

There have been many reported instances of the "Save as Adobe PDF" workflow crashing regardless of application, but precious few workarounds or resolutions. In troubleshooting, I discovered that there were three instances of the "Save as Adobe PDF.action" in three different locations: /Library/Automator; ~/Library/Automator; and /System/Library/Automator. By eliminating all except the version in /System/Library/Automator, the workflow started behaving, and I was able to cut PDFs directly from the Print dialog.

Mac Pro Available to Order, Shipping in February 2014

Apple’s much-anticipated new Mac Pro, first announced in June 2013 at WWDC and further described four months later, is now available to order (see “Apple Gets Around to a New Mac Pro,” 10 June 2013 and “Details Emerge about the New Mac Pro,” 22 October 2013). If you haven’t been paying attention, the new Mac Pro is a 9.9-inch tall, 6.6-inch wide (25.1 by 16.8 cm) cylinder, encased in polished aluminum, and packed with more CPU and GPU power than any previous Mac. (It turns out to be more gray than black, akin to the “space gray” color of the iPhone 5s.)

The “to order” words above are key; although Apple apparently said that some units will start shipping by the end of December 2013, the Apple Store predicts February 2014 as the ship date for orders placed now. The Mac Pro is being built at a new plant in the United States, and given that it’s a completely new industrial design, we’re not surprised that Apple might have trouble making them quickly.

Although Apple offers two standard configurations — a $2,999 quad-core model and a $3,999 6-core model — there’s no apparent difference apart from the starting options, which fall into four categories: processor, memory, storage, and graphics.

In terms of processor choices, clock speed drops somewhat as the number of cores increases, which has been the case for many Mac models over the years. Assuming your key applications have been optimized to take maximum advantage of multiple cores, adding cores generally produces enough of a performance increase to more than offset the lower clock speeds. (Mac Pro models with more cores have more L3 cache memory, too, which can also boost performance.) In addition, the Mac Pro CPUs, like those in all current Macs, feature Turbo Boost, which dynamically increases the clock speed in exchange for using fewer cores, thus improving the performance of apps that don’t take full advantage of multiple cores. However, as Marco Arment explains in detail, you’ll want to think carefully about the number of cores you choose given your main apps, because in certain situations, the trade-off of more cores for a lower clock speed can work against you.

3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 with 10 MB of L3 cache

3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 with 12 MB of L3 cache (Add $500)

3.0 GHz 8-core Intel Xeon E5 with 25 MB of L3 cache (Add $2,000)

2.7 GHz 12-core Intel Xeon E5 with 30 MB of L3 cache (Add $3,500)

With memory, the least you can get is 12 GB, with the jump to 16 GB adding $100, 32 GB coming in at $500 more, and 64 GB putting an additional $1,300 onto the price. Storage is similar, with 256 GB of flash storage standard and twice that — 512 GB — costing $300 more. A full 1 TB of flash storage costs an additional $800, so it may make more financial sense to stick with a relatively small internal SSD for Mac OS X and your apps, and then store all data on fast external drives.

Lastly, if graphics processing is important for your work (and it likely will be for many Mac Pro users), you can choose from dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM each, or bump up to dual D500 GPUs with 3 GB of VRAM for $400 more, or dual D700 GPUs with 6 GB of VRAM for $1,000 more. Apple suggests a Sharp 32-inch PN-K321 4K Ultra HD LED Monitor with that, for a hefty $3,595; if you don’t want a 4K display, the 27-inch Thunderbolt Display is only $999. If you have the money, the Mac Pro can run up to three 4K displays or up to six Thunderbolt displays.

In terms of basic specs, the Mac Pro has four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and an HDMI port with support for multichannel audio output. 802.11ac Wi-Fi is standard, as is Bluetooth 4.0. For audio support, it has a combined optical digital audio output/analog line out minijack, a headphone minijack with headset support, and a built-in speaker. Needless to say, the Mac Pro comes with OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and undoubtedly will not support any previous versions of Mac OS X.

While the prices of the standard configurations were revealed back in October, it wasn’t clear how expensive a maxed-out Mac Pro would be until now. Going for all of Apple’s options (but not a monitor, keyboard, or mouse) raises the price to a whopping $9,599. That’s a lot of money, to be sure, but in a quick pass through Dell’s and HP’s Web sites, trying to match configurations resulted in numbers that are similar or even higher.

Put simply, if you’re buying high-end hardware these days, you’re doing specialized work and you’re willing to pay more for performance. When I need to replace my current 2008 Mac Pro, it won’t be with one of Apple’s new cylindrical Mac Pro models because I just don’t do anything that an iMac (or likely even a Mac mini) can’t handle. In the past, I always bought Apple’s Power Macs and Mac Pros because everyday apps like word processors and databases benefited from the power boost, and because only Apple’s towers supported multiple displays until 2006 (when the iMac added second monitor support, with the Mac mini joining in 2009). I’ll just have to get over the fact that I’m no longer a pro, at least in Apple’s
eyes.

Comments about Mac Pro Available to Order, Shipping in February 2014(Comments are closed.)

I have been running a 2006 Mac Pro from new and over the years have upgraded RAM, discs and graphics cards. I have a 30 inch Apple Cinema Screen and I use this for photography and 3D visualisation.The Mac continues to run well, and does all that I require of it. Sure, it can take a bit of time over some tasks, but I let it attend to these while I am sleeping.

A new MacPro would be nice, but I would like a matching drive enclosure to take the four hard discs that sit inside my current Mac.

I do like my new iPad Air.

I have no great need to change, but that said, I don't think the price is so expensive as your article shows.

Recent teardown and comparison articles seem to show that Apple is providing a lot of power for the money with these new machines, and that one cannot homebrew a competitive system without paying thousands of dollars more.

The new Mac Pro is a continuation of Apple's unceasing march towards making the smallest possible hardware, while ruthlessly abandoning hardware and formats it sees as technological dead-ends. Obviously this rubs many people the wrong way, and for valid reasons, yet Apple seems justified in focusing on the largest business segment of real pros needing Xeon-based hardware, and they're future-proofing it with replaceable CPU and GPU cards, and focusing on having its pro apps utilize the powerful GPUs (which evolve much faster than the Xeon line).

I'm one of those non-pros who has long wished for the mythical Mac Pro Mini, but recent speed tests show that even for hardcore video, music and photo usage, a BTO iMac bridges the gap between current and last-gen Mac Pros, and should be sufficient for most people.

The new Mac Pro may very well be a great machine. But it is clearly a diss and a thumb of the nose to current Mac Pro users. Additional drives require external hardware, no support for existing video cards, etc. Apple may very well not need the support of the graphics professionals who helped to build the brand, but, as Adobe moves its action to the cloud, it becomes less advantageous to be working on a Mac. And the new Mac Pro is priced well outside the budgets of most graphics pros. Hard for me to see how this ends well for Apple. I think this is a textbook example of choosing form over function, and abandoning a loyal user base along the way.

So you wanted a traditional chassis style computer, because you like the drives on the inside, and you wanted it to have backward compatibility with your old video card(s)? I don't understand that thinking yet I have heard several express the same.

Last year, I dumped my MacPro 2008 with internal RAID for the thunderbolt array I now have on an i7 Mini. It's faster and more reliable. I even reused the SATA drives.

Same thing for video cards, why would one expect that a video card purchased for a motherboard designed 5+ years ago to be compatible after a major re-design? Even so, I'm using my Mini to power two 27" TB displays because it's built-in graphics are comparable to the Radeon 5770 that I ran in the MacPro.

This new MacPro offers even faster storage and video options and while the philosophy of how we do those things has been changed by Apple, the new starting point is better not worse. That's a good thing not a snub.